William Shakespeare

Samuel Cousins

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cousins based this mezzotint on the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, a work with a good claim to be a lifetime representation. Once owned by the 3rd Duke of Chandos, the painting given to London's National Portrait Gallery in 1856 by Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere as the gallery’s founding portrait. The Bard wears a mustache, light beard, a dark doublet, white collar with open ties, and an earring. Most scholars today attribute the painting to John Taylor, an actor and painter-stainer who was its first recorded owner; others suggest Shakespeare's friend the actor Richard Burbage.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art